My cousin Alizeh’s feet don’t reach the ground. This is true even when she’s standing on it. Here in Rockville this would be considered notable; fortunately, she lives back in Pakistan where people are used to the bizarre.
I’ll give you an example. Two years ago, when she was fifteen, Alizeh went on a school trip to a hill resort. She and a male friend ‘borrowed’ a teacher’s car and sneaked out of the guesthouse in the middle of the night, tasked with obtaining some Hunza water from a bootlegger.
On the way back, they got lost and found themselves in a newer part of the town, where high concrete walls enclosing darkened mansions were dotted amidst open fields. Realised there was a police patrol up ahead, and a plastic coca cola bottle filled with home-distilled alcohol on the back seat. Pakistani policemen are notorious for stopping mixed gender groups of young people and asking to see their marriage licences, and neither Alizeh nor her friend even had driving licenses. The coca cola bottle would easily triple the bribe required to extricate themselves.
So Alizeh, who is quiet but resourceful, seized the bottle and flung it out of the car window and over the wall of a house. The police didn’t stop them after all, and it was only the following year Alizeh learned that maybe she’d narrowly escaped bopping one of the bin Laden kids on the head with a bottle of hooch, and no one knew, or maybe they knew but just didn’t say. Things like that don’t happen in Rockville. Everything is clear and open and normal here, and people talk about themselves all the time. While in Pakistan, you live your life under translucent veils, and peeling away one reveals a secret underneath, and beneath that lies another veil.
Last summer when I visited Pakistan, Alizeh asked me, for the first time, to bring her something from the States. She asked for a pair of unisex Doc Martens, and when she put them on I realised why: they tethered her to the earth like a weight at the end of a balloon.
And this made me wonder, for the first time, if Alizeh herself was self-conscious about her quirk. It was hereditary, that was certain. Both her parents (who are cousins and, weirdly, both named Shaheen) also stand an inch above the ground. I should say that Shaheen Uncle and Shaheen Aunty are from Afghanistan and he is my dad’s oldest friend, not an actual uncle, though people often mistake me and Alizeh for sisters. Somewhere in Afghanistan there was once a village of Shaheens, all of them, no doubt, with exceptionally long-wearing footwear. But that was long before Alizeh or I were born, before the Soviets.
#
My own family came to the US when I was nine. Abu and Amma bought a Mailboxes Etc franchise in Bethesda, and we rented a small apartment. I was terribly homesick for Lahore at first. But the franchise grew to two and we moved into a row house in Rockville, and I decided I liked malls and going to the movies without a chaperone. On annual visits to Pakistan I felt embarrassed about my increasing rhoticism, but in Rockville I was British-sounding and exotic. I played that up for a bit: I read PG Wodehouse, said ‘cinemaah’ instead of ‘theatre’ and studied the BBC dramatisation of Pride and Prejudice. By junior year, though, I moved on to a fierce critique of colonialism. I got my nose pierced, and started my high school’s South Asian Cultural Association (SACA) along with Joey Agarwal, who was a senior and recommended I begin with Gramsci. I kept as much of the British accent as I could, though; it was cool, while the retroflex t’s of my childhood speech were redolent, in Rockville, of dingy convenience stores.
At the end of that school year, I went to Lahore to stay with my grandmother. Alizeh came over the day I arrived, stomping about in black Doc Martens despite the hundred odd degrees, and I told her about SACA and Joey Agarwal and gave her my copy of Fanon.
She took it, but seemed unenthused. ‘It seems, I don’t know, irrelevant,’ she said, and fiddled with the small pendant she always wore.
‘Irrelevant?’ I said. ‘Alizeh, it explains everything about this country! Our history, the politicians, the army, everything!’
She grimaced. ‘Well, it’s pretty irrelevant for you. You’re an American now.’
‘And you’re an Afghan so I guess you needn’t care either!’ I shot back.
She shook her head. ‘I’ve never even been west of Abbottabad. When I speak Pashto our driver makes fun of my accent.’
‘Dude,’ I said. ‘You’re not Pakistani. No one else in Pakistan floats an inch above the ground.’
She said nothing, but took a large sip of lemonade. As she raised the glass her elbow must have knocked against the plate, though it didn’t seem anywhere nearby. Cookies went tumbling to the floor.
#
In 1979, the first shot of war was felt by a small mining village in eastern Afghanistan. It was destroyed by a huge missile falling from the sky, leaving only two survivors: Shaheen Uncle and Shaheen Aunty, both then under ten years of age. They were brought to Peshawar and eventually to Lahore, where they were fostered by separate but related families. The gems found sewn into the hems of their clothes were used to fund their education and later, when their marriage was arranged, to buy them a house in Cantt. By the time Alizeh and I came around, they kept only a few stones, set into tiny pendants each member of their family wore around the neck, strung on black cords like amulets.
#
I fell to my knees to gather the scattered cookies and when I looked up, Alizeh was with me under the coffee table, brushing up crumbs. She met my eyes, unsmiling, and said in a pitch-perfect imitation of my grandmother’s distinctive Karachi accent, ‘Darling, so clumsy, why?’
I stared at her. Alizeh tapped her pursed lips meaningfully. ‘It is those big black boots, darling, why do you wear them? Every girl in your school wears pretty sandals, no? These boots, they make you clumsy, darling, and what boy likes a clumsy girl?’ Her composure broke and we both began to laugh.
The years and miles between us dissolved and it was though I’d never left. We were the two children who had spent every waking moment of every holiday together, evading my Deena Nani’s vigilant eye to plot another skirmish in the long-running war with the children next door, or clamouring to be taken for early morning picnics at Race Course Park.
‘Oh God, Alizeh, I’d forgotten you could do that,’ I said. ‘I wish Joey Agarwal were here, he’d love it!’
‘Darlings, come have lunch!’ I started and knocked my head on the table top. Alizeh, with more presence of mind, crawled out from beneath the table, and was demurely seated when Deena Nani came in.
She stared down at me, crouched underneath the coffee table and clutching a cookie, but said nothing. ‘Come now, khana is ready.’
She’d made dhansak. I hadn’t had it since my last visit, because Ammi says it’s too hard work and besides you don’t get good goat in America. It was the sharp, sweet, complex flavour of Sunday meals with my family, but this time I struggled. The rich funk of goat stuck in my throat and the oiliness of the sweet rice was nauseating.
Alizeh and Deena Nani dug into it, of course, and chattered happily about a new line of designer lawn about which I knew nothing except that it was fabric and nothing to do with gardens. I soon fell silent, feeling the cool white walls close around me.
A servant came in to clear the table and Deena Nani signalled for fruit. She selected a mango and started peeling it, cutting it into cubes and dropping them into two small bowls which she passed over to us.
As she gave me my bowl she grasped my hand. ‘So quiet, darling! You used to be a hot headed one, like me, with a mouth like a Gatling gun. What has America done to you?’
‘She must have jetlag,’ Alizeh said.
Deena Nani’s fine-boned hand tightened over mine. ‘Yes, you sleep for two three hours, jani, and you’ll feel better.’
‘No, I’d like to go out and get some air,’ I said quickly. ‘Maybe – maybe Alizeh and I could take the car for a couple of hours later, when it’s a little cooler? Just for a walk in Race Course Park?’
Alizeh pulled a face at me but said nothing.
#
So we went to Race Course Park that evening. The air lacked the bright freshness of those morning visits, but it smelt mostly the same, a little older and smokier. The walking track was packed with uncles and aunties doing their laps with business-like concentration so we wandered off alone, past the polo ground and its café, and across the open fields. This part of Race Course was empty, and soon we were chatting and laughing again, and the three weeks till I returned to Rockville no longer felt a trial.
Then we passed a group of young men playing cards in the long grass. We tried to circle around them, but they saw us and catcalls began. Alizeh kept her eyes down and increased her pace but I was instantly enraged. ‘What if strangers treated your mothers and sisters like this?’ I shouted.
‘You’re not in America, just ignore them,’ Alizeh muttered furiously, but they had heard.
‘Oho, dekho Amreekan!’ one shouted back, standing up. ‘Come daa-aance with me, baby, alpha disco charlie!’ He wiggled his hips and ran his hand over his crotch.
Alizeh stopped suddenly, her face pale with fury.
‘Look at the big black boot wali,’ he jeered.
‘Leave them alone, yaar,’ one of the seated boys said in Punjabi. ‘Come back to the game.’
The joker ignored him, and stepped closer to us, so close I could see the pores on the side of his nose. ‘Are you foreigner too, beautiful baby? Don’t be angry with me please,’ he said, and grinned.
I think only I had a clear view of what happened. I saw Alizeh clutch her pendant and turn away. And as she turned, some force, like a great invisible hand, swept our tormentor off his feet. He landed with a heavy thud several yards away and lay still. The other boys dashed towards him.
I stared at Alizeh in shock. Her outline seemed blurred against the lowering sun. I reached up to touch my cheek where that force, that thing, whatever it was, had brushed against me. Softly, as though covered in warm, living velvet.
‘Let’s go, quickly,’ Alizeh said, and I followed her back to the park entrance where Deena Nani’s driver awaited us.
#
There is this day I remember, soon after we arrived in DC. I was a kid. Our apartment was small but airy, with plate glass windows overlooking a wooded creek. I’d never seen anything like it and I was afraid to look outside.
I got lost on the way back to the apartment from the laundry room. I forgot which floor we were on and wandered through endless red-carpeted corridors past identical apartment doors until I got tired and upset and sat down on the floor to cry.
As I sobbed and sobbed I felt a tap on my shoulder and looked up. Through my tear filled eyes I saw a face, but it wasn’t a face: it was a collection of features: a writhing mouth, a nose and chin, and floating in that disaggregated mess, two moist brown eyes. I couldn’t help it, I screamed.
The man squatted next to me and one by one the features reassembled themselves to form a face, one I recognised. It was the building’s superintendent, and his mouth was not writhing, he was speaking. He knew me, and when I stopped screaming he took me back to the apartment. After that I always smiled at him, but didn’t look at his face if I could help it, and soon after that he moved on and I never saw him again.
It was a small thing, not important, but I remember his eyes still, though I’ve forgotten those of my grandfather whom I loved and who died only last year.
#
When Alizeh and I returned home to my grandmother’s, we went to sit on the terrace in the deepening twilight, sipping tea and waiting for the power cut to end. We sat silently for a long time. Overhead the stars started coming out, twinkling in the night haze. Then finally the lights came on indoors and streamed out of the window behind us. Moments later, the roar of the neighbours’ generators ceased, and was replaced by the hum of television sets. Our shadows stretched out before us; mine long and sharp-edged, hers squat and fuzzy-edged, out of focus. I glanced over at her surreptitiously, comparing our faces in my mind: brown-skinned, dark-eyed, nearly identical, but one familiar, the other strange.
First published in the Journal of the British Fantasy Society 10 in 2014